The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 eBook

After thus thinking over this interesting history
of the old place, as I reclined under the shade of
its trees, I was better prepared to enjoy the kind
hospitality which it then offered me. I felt a
peculiar pleasure in stepping into the same little
front porch which Townsend Bishop had built so many
years ago. And upon ascending the stairs I found
myself lingering a while by the old original balusters,
the building of which Roger Williams had perhaps viewed
with interest. Upon reaching the attic it was
a pleasure, indeed, to see in this new world the frame-work
of a house which for two hundred and fifty years had
stood so well the test of nature in all her moods.
No saw was used in shaping those oaken timbers.
They knew only the broad-axe. From this attic
I descended to the sitting-room, to spend a while under
the same low beams which had greeted the first visitors
of the house. Here I imagined the Nurse family
living in quiet and peace. Here I pictured the
son Samuel, as, later, he wondered over and over again
how he could remove the reproach which was on his
mother’s name. And I thought that to him
his descendants owed much, for it was mainly to his
pleadings that the General Court exonerated her in
1710, and the Church in 1712.

While sitting there I learned of some alterations
which had been made from time to time: how the
front of the house, before which the old roadway used
to be, had been widened by extending the western end
beyond the porch.

As I came out of the house upon the green grass around
it, I enjoyed again the grand outlook over the surrounding
country,—­the same which in the days of
agony had strengthened human souls,—­and
then walked down the hill, by the family burying-ground,
out through the entrance-gate into Collins street,
the public thoroughfare.

I left the monument and its interesting associations
that August day of 1885 (it was dedicated only the
July 30 before) with the feeling that as the present
descendants of Rebecca Nurse owe much to her son Samuel,
so their future descendants will be indebted to them
for the appropriate manner in which they have still
further striven to vindicate before the world the
innocence of a much-wronged ancestor.

* * * *
*

THE PRESENT RESOURCES OF MASSACHUSETTS.

BY H.K.M.

Massachusetts is a busy state. The old time factory
bell has not entirely given way to the steam whistle,
nor the simple village spire to the more pretentious
ecclesiastical tower of to-day, yet the energizing
force of material prosperity has quickened the blood
in nearly every hamlet, modernized the old, or built
up a new, so that throughout the state there is a
substantial freshness indicative of progressive thrift.